Chronicle Editor
Pathisa Nyathi
FORMER colonial powers seem to take a keen interest in the political and economic affairs emerging in their former colonies when they become independent. This is particularly palpable in former French territories where the metropole continues to effect a hold on the colonies that are rich in natural resources which the colonial powers wish to continue extracting and importing to power their overseas economies.
Alliances are engendered and sustained and political interference seems justified between the mother and weaned babies who must never grow to become independent of the mother. Matters of political succession are manipulated to produce desired results, always in the economic interests of the mother who is not keen to let go. What then emerges are blocs of Francophone and Anglophone countries that fail to relate meaningfully in the service of interests of their people. Instead, they remain unco-ordinated and isolated in the various zones of manipulation and political guidance.
What suffer are their followers. Where leaders harbour and engage in political dictatorship they get tolerated as long as they wittingly allow resources within their countries to be siphoned without let. Dictators who are not tolerated are those who shut the economic doors allowing unbridled access to the feeding trophies within their countries.
Political dictatorships are glossed over where the dictators distance themselves from their followers in the vein pursuit of positive diplomatic relations.
Lo and behold those leaders who seek to champion the interests of their own people. They are hounded and demonised. Ultimately their death warrants are signed and they meet with deaths of all manner, kind and complexion. They must provide good lessons to those African leaders who may be tempted to follow the same routes of serving well and honourably their people by centering and serving their interests. But sometimes the shenanigans and long-term intrigues begin long before the process of decolonisation takes any meaningful root.
Desired post-colonial leaders among the political contestants are subtly and covertly chosen outside of the popular preferences in order to ensure new-look coloniser’s candidates are marble polished on the surface for presentation to the electorate who get the artificially impressive façade through manipulation by the press and other image-building and image-damaging ploys.
This is by way of introducing the letter that Mtshana Ncube wrote to Cde Edward Ndlovu who was Zapu’s Secretary for Projects and Research. As has and still is the case there are among the lot of Africans those who see beyond the manipulative and deceptive facades that are created. Unfortunately, their progressive ideas never see the light of day.
Their fall by the wayside is guaranteed and they remain in the political abyss and strongly smelling and drowning cesspools of all time.
The political movement in pre-independence Zimbabwe had all the ingredients for a recipe that was worked out to produce a political menu that was to leave the nation divided and prone to political manipulation and disinformation. The Patriotic Front had been pushed into existence by the well-meaning African leaders, in particular the Frontline Presidents who were keen to see emerge out of Zimbabwe’s prolonged liberation struggle a united, peaceful and development-oriented nation. A genuine patriotic front would have obviated the pain and anguish that emerged out of Zimbabwe following independence. That period had been well planned for, anticipated and manipulated over a very long period of time. Blue-eyed boys were identified, polished up and presented to the unsuspecting electorate.
The Patriotic Front and a “patriotic front” had to fail, just as Zipa had failed in 1976, just as Zapu had failed in 1963 and exiled Zapu had failed in 1971. The same not-so-clean hands spoiled the political broth. The emerging political arrangements were so crafted to prop up Western interests within the context of the hot Cold War. The struggle for Zimbabwe’s independence was hatched and prosecuted within the context of the Cold War that emerged after cessation of World War II hostilities in 1945.
The Cold War interests and contestations played out at numerous levels: national/local, regional and international.
South Africa, at the time under the leadership of John Balthazar Vorster was an interested partner both in the context of the Cold War but also in the longstanding relations between the African National Congress/Umkhonto weSizwe on the one hand and Zapu/Special Affairs/Zipra and the Soviet Union and her allies on the other. The emerging shenanigans were complex and not so easy to appreciate in particular by those whose political perceptive capacities were stunted and malnourished.
Against such a complex, complicated and confusing background there were men and women who managed to keep
their heads above murky waters of political and economic contestations. Their political eyelids managed to wipe off the perplexing and blinding politically manipulative smudges. We take up Mtshana Ncube’s letter of October 23, 1976.
“Let me repeat again that we will not move forward as long we become diplomats and not revolutionaries. In my view, this is the last chance for the movement to survive. As long as we emerge out of Geneva as the compromisers throwing out all principles then it is goodbye to revolution and enter full-fledged bourgeois politics. Personally, I do not even understand anymore what it is we say or even do. I hope that those who advise our President do not forget or ride rough-shod over the views expressed generally by the exile element of the movement.
“We are showing absolutely no self-reliance in all matters: look at the “advisors” to the conference, etc. It has serious implications for the ideological direction of the movement. How can a capitalist advise a socialist on the future of an independent Zimbabwe, I want to know? I tremble at what faces the movement.”
Prophetic indeed!
Online Reporter